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I have been collecting examples of public signage that fails to communicate helpful information to pedestrians for a few years now. Signage for motorists was standardised many years ago and is generally very clear. Pedestrians it can be very poor indeed as shown in these examples.

I spotted these first ones at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham in 2007. There are actually 20 halls over a wide area. Should I go left or right or take the shuttle. Who knows!

OK, do I want to go to the halls or to the halls?

Why would I want to go to a pedestrian subway? Does it lead anywhere?

Shall I go to the halls for the pedestrian subway. Hmm…

And what on earth was this map meant to convey? There is a stub road that doesn’t go anywhere and there are no footpaths at all. It doesn’t help that the car park numbers have been covered over, but it wasn’t very useful before.

Car park mapfail at the NEC

Back in Ipswich, this map outside the royal mail sorting office seems to be designed to confuse.

Map outside the Ipswich sorting office – no context

And this map in the grounds of the main hospital fails to show any pedestrian routes, include the main pedestrian/cycle route to Woodbridge Road on the right of the map. It also fails to name Woodbridge Road and doesn’t show the bus stops.

Ipswich hospital map totaly fails to show pedestrian route

There is actually a very good bus service along Woodbridge road, including ‘Superroute 66’ which runs 24 hours a day. Someone should take the original promotional material down now because I think it has lost some of its initial impact!

‘Super’ route 66 – dodgy promotional material!

24 hours a day

Needless to say, I have selected only the failures to show here. There is a lot of very good helpful signage out there but this isn’t it and there needs to be better quality control to stop the duff stuff getting put up and to get it taken down quickly. Do report failures on FixMyStreet. Some of the best work is being done in London with their Legible London project.

Pedestrians are discriminated against

"In contrast to the changes made to every town and city to ease motor transport, walking has been made ever more unpleasant. Pedestrians have been treated with contempt. In a myriad of ways when we walk we are treated with less respect than when we drive". (quote for a cross-party parliamentary select committee report on walking in towns from 2001).

This blog documents how this discrimination works, what laws underpin it and what people are doing to counter it. Please take action and share your experiences in the comments section, on twitter or join our facebook group. Add photos to the Flickr pool. All photographs cc-by-sa 3.0 unless otherwise stated or obvious from the source.